XDCAM, introduced by Sony in 2003, has four different products lines- the XDCAM SD, XDCAM HD, XDCAM EX and XDCAM HD422, which differ in encoder, frame size, container and recording media. Designed for heavy-duty field acquisition, Sony XDCAM camcorders provide the excellent picture quality, operability and reliability. Besides that, Sony XDCAM camcorders offer a wide range of innovative features that maximize the benefits of nonlinear disc media.

Sony XDCAM camcorders usually record MXF and MP4 format video, and it usually use MPEG2 codec, this codec is not good for editing in FCP X, and you will encounter importing and codec problems when you try to import Sony XDCAM footage to Final Cut Pro.

“I've been looking through the postings and there are many comments about how to transcode from XDCAM to ProRes. I've run into ‘general error’ messages batching from FCP 7 so now I'm using compressor (tried MPEG stream clip but it lost the timecode reference). So my question is, coming from a U1 is there any intermediary device that I can plug into that will encode to ProRes in real time?”

To fulfill your need, a video converter app is needed. Pavtube HD Video Converter for Mac is the tool highly recommended. The program comes with several optimized format for Final Cut Pro, which enables you to transcode XDCAM to ProRes 422, ProRes 422 HQ, ProRes 422 LT, ProRes 4444 for using in Final Cut Pro X/7/6 directly. Besides converting XDCAM to Apple ProRes, this program also enables you to convert many other videos files like AVI/MKV/MP4/MPG to ProRes on Mac with the best quality.

Step 1: Launch the HD Video Converter on your Mac, and then click the “Add video” button to import your source files directly. In order to import several files at one time, you can click “Add from folder” button.

Step 2: Click the “Format” bar to get the drop-down menu and you can get “Final Cut Pro>>Apple ProRes codec”, including ProRes 422, ProRes 422 (HQ), ProRes 422 (LT), ProRes 422 (Proxy) and ProRes 4444. Choose the proper one you want. Here, we suggest you to choose Apple ProRes 422 .mov as the best output format.

Step 3: Click “Settings” button to customize the output video and audio settings by yourself. But if you are not good at it, you’d better use the default parameters, they will ensure you a good balance between file size and image quality basically. You can change the resolution, bit rate, frame rate as you need.

Step 4: Now, click "Convert" and let it go.

Conclusion: The program supports batch conversion. So if you have lots of files to convert, check “Shut down computer after conversion” and you can go away without keeping an eye on it. Once the conversion process shows in 100%, click “Open” to get the output videos.